Yuletide reveals

[kindkit]

I wrote one Yuletide story and one little treat this year.

Ghosts of Ettersberg (3101 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Rating: Mature
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Thomas Nightingale, Peter Grant
Summary: There's more than one kind of ghost, and more than one kind of absence.

Anyone who likes Thomas Nightingale in RoL (does anyone not like Thomas Nightingale? what a sad thought) wonders what happened at Ettersberg. Aaronovitch has been dropping hints of something catastrophic through three novels; this is my take. Fortunately sineala liked it even though it's a bit grim as Yuletide gifts go.


Rewritten (234 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: T. E. Lawrence
Summary: Lawrence creating himself.

This was written for Skazka, whom I don't know, but whose mention in their prompt of Lawrence possibly being transmasculine haunted me. This is the first time I've ever written a trans* character. I kind of stopped at the happy ending; there's another story to be written of Lawrence's later loss of confidence (tied in both to the events of Deraa--even more awful if Lawrence is a trans* man--and to the way the Arab independence movement was outmaneuvered by the colonial powers) and how he continued to try out new names without ever quite finding a self to be comfortable in.


I can also now publicly thank the amazing halotolerant, who for the second year in a row (!!!) wrote me a fantastic Yuletide story. This time it was How Many Strawberries Grow in in the Sea?, which you don't need canon knowledge to enjoy and which I hope I can eventually convince everyone to read. (ETA: Halo also beta-read "Ghosts of Ettersberg" and helped make it better than it had been.)

I'm working on a set of Yuletide recs for the first half of the alphabet, but the wheels of reccing grind slowly.

Comments

[kindkit]

I'm finally getting around to answering comments after a week and more of being useless for anything but sleeping . . .

I want to know what the specific thing with the Big Plot Twist is! You are unlikely to ruin it for me; more likely you'll save me from reading it and being angry/disappointed.

You're right about the weirdness of those scenes in King Rat. It did feel like pure heterosexual-male fantasy added in for titillation or to undermine the homoeroticism: specifically I think it's meant to demonstrate that Peter Marlowe is heterosexual. The interesting thing though is that Marlowe isn't really given back-pats in the rest of the narrative for his heterosexuality, and his treatment of Sean in particular makes him seem like a selfish bigot, as even Peter himself realizes. That plus the fact that the Exotic Sexy Native Girl scenes don't go anywhere narratively makes them so obviously extraneous that I'm surprised they weren't edited out.

[halotolerant]

'The Absolutist' by John Boyne (author of 'Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' which I actually found very powerful although I wasn't too sure if honestly I liked the book existing at all, if that makes sense). I was angry and really quite upset by it (I don't usually ever want to write to people, but I did want to write to JB going 'What the actual fuck were you thinking? And more to the point what the actual fuck do you want other people to think about gay people?') and it certainly fell into that classic *coughs* category of 'gayness happens but there's always death soon afterwards plus they're, like, twisted'

I agree, Peter's treatment of Sean is very much criticised - perhaps in a way, he's seeing a nasty, brutish part of himself that isn't very kind either to someone over whom he has power like Sean or to the native girls he's got really pretty violent fantasies about. The problem is that Sean has depth, whereas Clavell leaves Exotic Sexy Native Girls as window-dressing with no agency apart from their apparent magnetic attraction to white men.... *sighs*

[kindkit]

Oh, that's a shame about The Absolutist--I had been thinking of reading it. Though considering it's being praised to the skies by most mainstream critics for "sensitivity" etc., I should have known better--there's nothing a mainstream critic loves better than sad queer stories that end in death and loneliness.

I was trying to google to find out if John Boyne is gay/bi, but the internet is not being forthcoming about it. Something else I don't trust is books about queer men by straight men, because again they tend to go the death and loneliness route. (Actually this is a common flaw in all mainstream or so-called "literary fiction" novels about queer men, partly because of cultural homophobia I think and partly because of the dominant aesthetic that says happy or happy-ish endings are automatically trite.)

Good point about Marlowe's unkindness towards people he's got power over--on the whole I think Marlowe generally isn't very kind anyway, although a lot of people in the book are very kind to him. It would be possible to read Marlowe as deeply afraid of any "soft" emotions, which I would tend to read as being afraid of his own suppressed homosexual attractions. He's clearly attracted to Sean--I'm struck by the fact that when talking about the "old" Sean who was his friend, he mentions how good-looking he was--and cruelly rejects Sean out of fear of that. Clavell more or less explicitly contrasts him to the King, who is attracted to Sean but unashamed of it. And of course the relationship between the King and Peter Marlowe is hugely erotically charged, right up to the ending with Marlowe crying on the King's bed. Read that way, Marlowe's fantasies about "possessing" the girls look a lot like overcompensation.

[halotolerant]

In the Absolutist it's not so much 'ends unhappily' as (SPOILERS)
(SPOILERS)
'queer protagonist murders his lover as his lover wants to end affair'....

...yes. I would capslock all my feelings about that but you can probably imagine.

*takes deep calming breath*

Have you seen the 'King Rat' movie? Talk about sexual charge... the actors play one scene in particular to the point where if they actually kissed you wouldn't blink, and the ending feels like the end of 'Gone with the Wind' or something

[kindkit]

Oh. My. God. Yes, capslock feels appropriate. What kind of idiotic person (and I include both the writer and the critics who've praised the book) think that sort of thing is okay to include in a story about queer men? That's the plot of a queer-exploitation novel from 1955, not a supposedly sensitive and true and literary novel from 2012. How disgustingly stereotyped. I am honestly taken aback that something like that could be published now, especially to critical acclaim.

The King Rat film, on the other hand, I must add to my Netflix queue immediately.